Your new product or service is the most important thing for you and your team. You’ve poured your heart and soul into every facet. But what happens when it becomes clear that whatever you’re introducing isn’t seen as vital by your audience?
Don’t sell your product or service to them. That’s right. If your audience isn’t seeing your offer as meeting a core business need, stop selling it to them.
Remember: you’re dealing with the emotional human mind. People prioritize their most immediate needs and wants—and anything else is secondary.
We call these main course issues. Main course issues keep your audience up and night and steal their attention from just about anything else. We’re talking mission-critical concerns. In healthcare, it may be data security and compliance. For the CEO of a manufacturing company, it’s material sourcing and supply chain availability.
Keeping with the dining metaphor, if your offering is not perceived as an answer to a core issue, you’re selling the side dish. It’s not that your product or service isn’t relevant or remarkably unique. It just requires a different communication strategy.
We’ve worked with many companies with this communication challenge and found these ways to help shift perspectives.
1. Find common ground.
Go beyond just the finite. Think bigger, higher-order concepts. Make the association by connecting the dots between your product or service and the context of a larger topic. Talk trends. Do what it takes to be included in the main course conversation.
2. Flip the script.
Become a solutions provider. Arm your customers with center-of-the-plate content. Entice with valuable info like a white paper that’s central to their pain. Suddenly, you’re the company helping your customer address key challenges—and you just happen to have something that can help.
3. Prioritize your target.
Forget the corner office and the C-suite. Seek out the people in the organization likely to champion your offering. They’ll fight for you. Talk to them in the context of problems they confront and they’ll champion you internally.
It all comes down to honestly assessing where your brand and offering fit in your audience’s mind. And if it’s not the main course, get creative and take other approaches to get there.
Want to talk about how you can move from side dish to main course? We’ve got the recipe.